With the premiere of George Lucas’s new movie Red Tails, there’s a renewed interest in the Tuskegee Airmen who trained in Alabama.

In recognition of this important movie, NewSouth has released new print and ebook titles by military historian Daniel Haulman exploring common misconceptions about the Tuskegee Airmen, coinciding with our book The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History: 1939-1949 by Haulman, Joseph Caver, and Jerome Ennels.

As Haulman writes in his introduction to What Hollywood Got Right and Wrong about the Tuskegee Airmen in the Great New Movie, Red Tails, “For anyone who wants to know what in the Red Tails movie is not historically accurate, I have noted some cases. This list of differences between the Red Tails depiction of the Tuskegee Airmen and the real Tuskegee Airmen story is not intended to denigrate the movie — Red Tails is dramatic and thrilling and is a great contribution to the depiction of black servicemen in World War II — but merely to caution those who might mistakenly take the fictional account as history.”

The Airmen commander, for instance, never demanded that the Airmen be able to trade their old planes for new ones as depicted in the movie; the Airmen also did not protect the bombers alone in Berlin. These differences and more Haulman points out with praise for the Red Tails movie but with an eye toward historical accuracy for interested readers.

Haulman’s Red Tails title joins two others: Eleven Myths about the Tuskegee Airmen (available in print and ebook) and The Tuskegee Airmen and the “Never Lost a Bomber” Myth (ebook exclusive). These books look at additional “myths” that have cropped up around the legend of the Tuskegee Airmen, including the myth that the Tuskegee Airmen were the first to shoot down German jets, and that the Airmen once robbed an Allied train to get fuel tanks for their planes.

These three books serve as handy companions both to the Red Tails movie, and to the Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History book written by Haulman, Caver, and Ennels. The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History is a lush, detailed volume that spotlights not just the pilots themselves, but also the doctors, nurses, mechanics, navigators, weathermen, and parachute riggers who contributed to the Airmen’s success. The book includes hundreds of photographs of the Airmen, many never before published, to truly bring the triumphs and struggles of the Tuskegee Airmen to life.

CNN included a number of these photographs in their story “A midair courtship: Tuskegee’s historic love story,” which profiles Herbert Carter and Mildred Hemmons. Carter was a Tuskegee Airmen and Hemmons one of the first black women in Alabama to receive a pilot’s license, who later worked as a civilian at the Tuskegee airfield. CNN details their romance and also how they broke racial barriers, including when Hemmons was photographed with first lady Eleanor Roosevelt after flying her plane.

Lt. Col. Carter appeared with Tuskegee Airmen authors Caver, Ennels, and Haulman decades later at the release of the book in 2011.

Authors Joseph Caver (left), Daniel Haulman (top middle) and Jerome Ennels (right) with former Tuskegee Airman Lt. Col. (ret.) Herbert Carter (bottom middle).

We hope that all of these books continue to preserve the well-deserved interest in the Tuskegee Airmen generated by the Red Tails movie.

* The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History: 1939-1949 is available in print direct from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite book retailer.

* Eleven Myths about the Tuskegee Airmen is available in print and ebook formats from NewSouth Books or your favorite book retailer or ebook store.

* The Tuskegee Airmen and the “Never Lost a Bomber” Myth is available in all major ebook formats from NewSouth Books or your favorite ebook store.

* What Hollywood Got Right and Wrong about the Tuskegee Airmen in the Great New Movie, Red Tails is available in all major ebook formats from NewSouth Books or your favorite ebook store.

Dr. Ellen Weiss’s new lushly-illustrated biography of African American architect Robert Taylor is helping bring this figure the recognition he deserves. The January 12 New York Times “Antiques” column called Taylor a “pioneering architect,” and the Mobile Times-Register called Weiss’s book on Taylor, Robert R. Taylor and Tuskegee: An African American Architect Designs for Booker T. Washington, “long overdue.”

The Times-Register article “Southern Bound: Tuskegee architect finally gets his due,” by John Sledge, calls Weiss a “thorough researcher and a graceful writer who nicely balances Taylor’s personal and professional lives.” Indeed Weiss describes Taylor’s early life and includes both Taylor’s own letters, and writing about Taylor by his contemporaries, along with detailed accounts of the buildings that Taylor designed at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, later Tuskegee University. Many of those buildings are still in use.

“I feel I know him,” Weiss told New York Times reporter Eve Kahn for the “Antiques” column, given the volume of documents Weiss studied related to Taylor.

Weiss contextualizes Taylor’s accomplishments, examining them against the Jim Crow laws of the 1900s. As the Times-Register notes:

Weiss is also very good on the difficulties that black architects and tradesmen faced in a constricted society. Though extremely careful, Taylor did push for increased opportunities for minority professionals, and on at least one occasion he had to deal with a racist white tradesman. Like [Booker T.] Washington, Taylor remained relentlessly optimistic, though Weiss reveals that after 1919 when whites were viciously assaulting entire black neighborhoods, “he wrote privately that he could no longer assume that white people were fair minded.” It was a rare pessimistic comment from a man focused on work, family and surviving in a hostile world. But in finding that reference, Weiss has given us the whole man, in his glory and his despair.

Ellen Weiss’s Robert R. Taylor and Tuskegee: An African American Architect Designs for Booker T. Washington is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite book retailer. At 300 pages and including over 100 photographs, including a full catalog of Taylor’s work at Tuskegee University, Weiss’s book will be of interest to social and architectural historians and the general reader alike.

Two NewSouth Books authors, Fred Gray and Constance Curry, will be added to the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame during the 2012 Trumpet Awards on Friday, January 6, at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta.

Attorney Fred D. Gray served as the Montgomery Bus Boycott’s lawyer in 1950 at the age of only 24, defending such civil rights figures as Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. He has worked on numerous civil rights cases since that time, including defending the Freedom Riders, the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers, and the victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Gray chronicled his civil right career in his memoir Bus Ride for Justice and the book The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, published by NewSouth Books; an updated edition of Bus Ride will be published in spring 2012.

Constance Curry’s most recent publication from NewSouth Books was co-authoring Bob Zellner’s autobiography, the award-winning The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement, currently in production as a movie with executive producer Spike Lee. During the Civil Rights Movement, Curry worked for a number of organizations including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She is a documentary filmmaker and the author of a number of books; she has twice received the Lillian Smith Book Award, including for Wrong Side of Murder Creek.

2012 marks the ninth year for the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame, sponsored by the Trumpet Awards Foundation. The Foundation states that the purpose of the Walk is “to give recognition to the foot soldiers of justice who sacrificed and struggled to make equality a reality for all.” Learn more at the Foundation website, trumpetfoundation.org.

Bus Ride to Justice: Changing the System by the System by Fred Gray and The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement by Bob Zellner and Constance Curry are both available direct from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookstore.

Politician and consumer advocate Ralph Nader, in his December 22 column “Recommended Holiday Reading for the Caring, Agitated Mind” posted on his website, recommended Jack Shelton’s Consequential Learning: A Public Approach to Better Schools as “a wake-up call to parents and students.” NewSouth published Consequential Learning in 2005. From the column:

[Consequential Learning is] a wake-up call to parents and students so indentured to sterile, high-frequency multiple-choice standardized tests. Mr. Shelton stresses that student learning comes from both the classroom and the community, with the lessons of the former applied to the benefit of the latter. He shows from his experience in Alabama’s schools and colleges how students become “self-aware learners” from connecting school and community “in the formation of their personal characters.” Filled with examples and strategies for both civic and academic growth.

Jack Shelton has worked with rural schools and communities for thirty years, and has served as an education consultant in the United States and Australia. In 1979, he organized the Program for Rural Services and Research at the University of Alabama to foster rural education, economic development, entrepreneurship, cultural documentation, and community health.

Consequential Learning: A Public Approach to Better Schools by Jack Shelton is available direct from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.

In advance of April 2012′s one-hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, NewSouth Books is pleased to make a rare firsthand account of the disaster newly available for readers.

Sylvia Harbaugh Caldwell traveled on the Titanic in 1912 with her husband Albert and their ten-month-old son Alden; the family survived due to fortunate seats on the Titanic’s Lifeboat 13. In the aftermath, Caldwell published Women of the Titanic Disaster, a narrative of the sorrow and sacrifices of her fellow female passengers.

Almost no copies of Women of the Titanic Disaster exist; but professor Julie Hedgepeth Williams, Caldwell’s great-niece, inherited a copy, which she used as a basis for her new book A Rare Titanic Family: The Caldwells’ Story of Survival. In conjunction with NewSouth’s publication of Rare Titanic Family in January 2012, Women of the Titanic Disaster is now available for wide readership as an ebook.

Williams calls Women of the Titanic Disaster a “godsend in letting me hear Sylvia’s voice.” Indeed this touching recollection of the harrowing Titanic disaster will be treasured by readers and researchers alike. Women of the Titanic Disaster is available in the Apple iBookstore, and for the Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, and all major ebook devices.

A Rare Titanic Family: The Caldwells’ Story of Survival, by Julie Hedgepeth Williams, will be available in January 2012. Williams is also the author of Wings of Opportunity: The Wright Brothers in Montgomery, Alabama, 1910.

Author and humorist Lewis Grizzard famously refused to write using a computer, so the fact that a number of his best-loved titles are now available as ebooks carries no lack of irony. NewSouth has re-issued Grizzard’s They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat and Elvis is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself — both long out of print — in both paperback and ebook formats, with two more titles on the way. If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I’m Going to Nail My Feet to the Ground and I Haven’t Understood Anything Since 1962 will both be available in print and ebook in early 2012.

News of the Grizzard ebooks has the South buzzing — and indeed orders are pouring in from all across the country. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Arts & Culture blog called the new publications “a veritable renaissance in the Southern humorist’s work.”

“Fans,” the paper continued, “should be feeling pretty good themselves right about now.”

(This, in kind contrast to columnist Dave Lieber’s recent piece, “Why papers are dying: Lewis Grizzard died first,” in which Lieber praises Grizzard’s writing and humor, but ends with the statement that Grizzard is “not talked about anymore.” We respectfully suggest the reports of the death of Grizzard’s popularity may be greatly exaggerated.)

The Journal-Constitution‘s Buzz column with Jennifer Britt and the Wilmington, North Carolina Star-News Bookmarks column also chimed in about the ebooks.

Grizzard’s widow Dedra has been the driving force behind the reissued books, spearheading the resurgence almost twenty years after Grizzard passed away. In interviews on Newsmakers with Tim Bryant on 1340 WGAU in Athens, Georgia, and The Rick Humphries Show in 640 WGST, Dedra talked about how she and NewSouth fit when she found a publisher that would reissue Grizzard’s books right away, instead of simply holding the rights.

Dedra told Rick Humphries that she believed part of Grizzard’s appeal was that he could write about “things we think about but don’t necessarily know how to verbalize.” She and Tim Bryant spoke about how the ebooks might help Grizzard gain a new generation of fans.

“Lewis’s work is universal, it’s timeless,” she said. “He’s very funny and writes about the truth of the human condition. I hope we have a lot of younger fans that are listening and will download a book and have a taste of Lewis.”

Read the Arts & Culture blog and The Buzz at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution website, and Bookmarks is archived on the Star-News website. You can listen to Dedra Grizzard on Newsmakers with Tim Bryant and The Rick Humpries Show online.

Lewis Grizzard’s They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat and Elvis is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself are both available in print and in all major ebook formats from NewSouth Books or your favorite book retailer.

Dr. Ethel Hall, the first African American woman elected to the Alabama State Board of Education, died this month at age 83. Hall had recounted both her two decades on the Board of Education and her early struggle to achieve higher education in her memoir My Journey, published earlier this year by NewSouth Books.

In a review of My Journey, First Draft‘s Linda McQueen called Dr. Hall “the epitome of a true role model for all generations. [Her memoir] is filled with memorable narratives of faith and hope. It is an inspiration to readers facing adversities and finding joy and success in achieving their goals.”

In her memoir, Dr. Hall discussed her experiences with prejudice and discrimination, while at the same time emphasizing her family’s love that helped her pursue education despite her family’s poverty; Hall left her parents’ farm at a young age live with her grandparents in order to be closer to school. She later graduated from Alabama A&M College, received masters and doctoral degrees, and taught high school and college before her election to the state board. Among issues she dealt with were strengthening academic requirements for grade school education and maintaining education standards despite budget cuts.

Dr. Hall wrote, “I carefully and consciously prepared for a challenging, demanding career in education because I believe learning is a lifelong process that impacts every individual. My experiences have affirmed my belief in a greater need for advocacy for those who are least able to make the changes needed in our social system.”

Read more about Dr. Ethel Hall from the Birmingham News.

My Journey: A Memoir of the First African American to Preside Over the Alabama Board of Education by Dr. Ethel Hall is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite bookseller.

After years spent published by New York houses, the distinctly Southern flavor of humorist Lewis Grizzard’s books has come home to the South. In the article “NewSouth Reissues Southern Humorist’s Oeuvre,” Publishers Weekly‘s Marc Schultz spotlights the unique connection between Grizzard and NewSouth, which has joined with the Grizzard estate to bring all the writer’s books back to print.

Despite Lewis Grizzard’s status as a perennial bestseller, many of his books had been out of print for decades. As the Publishers Weekly article relates, Grizzard’s widow Dedra had promised Grizzard she’d “keep his work alive,” but had yet to find the right publisher. A friend directed her to NewSouth Books.

“I spent a lot of time looking for publishers,” Dedra told Publishers Weekly. “They either did not get Lewis, his works, or Southern heritage and traditions, or they were too small to market it, or they wanted to hold the rights.” After she spoke with NewSouth, Dedra said, “I literally felt at home. I had found what I was looking for: they published good books with a dedicated staff committed to excellence.” NewSouth publisher Suzanne La Rosa explained that “we were immediately interested because [Grizzard's voice] is a unique expression of a particular aspect of southern culture, and his popularity is clearly ongoing.”

NewSouth’s bringing something new to the deal, too. In addition to returning to print Grizzard’s They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat and Elvis is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself (with If I Ever Get Back to Georgia and Daddy Was a Pistol and I’m a Son of a Gun coming next), NewSouth is also releasing these titles for the first time as ebooks. The books are available in all the major ebook formats, often before the print books are available, as part of NewSouth’s commitment to make all of our titles available to the widest audience possible and across all reading platforms. Already the Grizzard ebooks are some of our bestselling digital titles.

Dedra recalled that when Grizzard “worked with his New York publishers and he faced countless nightmares. But [La Rosa] gets it! I really could not be happier.”

Read the full article at the Publishers Weekly website, and learn more about Lewis Grizzard’s works at the official website, lewisgrizzard.com, or at the official Lewis Grizzard Facebook Page.

They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat and Elvis is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself are available in print and ebook formats from NewSouth Books or your favorite book or ebook retailer.

NewSouth Books is pleased to have been involved with the Alabama Folklife Association‘s annual journal Tributaries from the beginning. Named after the waterways that divide the state’s regions from the Coastal Plain to the Tennessee Valley, Tributaries is also a symbolic title. As Jim Carnes said in the premiere issue, “The state’s cultural landscape, like its physical one, features a network of ‘tributaries’ rather than a single dominant mainstream.” Tributaries‘s thirteenth issue will be released later this month.

The Alabama Folklife Association (AFA) plays a significant role in documenting Alabama’s distinct identity through festivals, conferences, and publications like Tributaries. The journal is edited by the AFA and designed and produced by NewSouth in consultation with the AFA. NewSouth Editor-in-Chief Randall Williams called the collaboration “a happy pairing of interest and abilities.”

Themes that Tributaries has explored over the past thirteen years include issues on Alabama blues, sacred music, language, and food. Tributaries also features reviews of “documentary products” such as books, films, and sound recordings. Many issues include obituaries of noted Alabama figures, including blues musician Willie King, folklorist Bess Lomax Hawes, and storyteller Kathryn Tucker Windham (in the upcoming thirteenth issue).

Members of the NewSouth family have also written for Tributaries, including former staff member Kevin Nutt (now with the Alabama Department of Archives and History) writing on blues music in Butler County, and author Jacqueline Matte (They Say the Wind is Red) exploring the Indian term “Yakni” as evinced by the Choctaws’ relationship with the environment. Numerous articles over the years have studied the Alabama branch of Sacred Harp music, also known as shape-note singing (issues 4, 7. 8, and 12). Other writers have pursued the Alabama roots of the folk legend John Henry (issues 5 and 11).

The Alabama Folklife Association provides a great service by capturing these valuable stories. To submit articles or to learn more about Tributaries, please visit the AFA website.

Writer Margaret Eby remembers the late Alabama folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham and pays tribute to Southern ghost stories in her new Paris Review essay “Southern Gothic.” The essay coincides with the posthumous release of Windham’s final book, She: The Old Woman Who Took Over My Life. From the Paris Review:

Windham’s voice is unforgettable. In high school, I would listen to All Things Considered every couple weeks to hear … her rolling, sticky Southwest Alabama accent … “I don’t care whether you believe in ghosts,” Windham was fond of saying. “The good ghost stories do not require that you believe in ghosts.”

The ghosts that Windham believed in weren’t the green spectral presences captured by bounty hunters armed with flotillas of infrared photographic equipment, nor are her tales the ax-murderer campfire lore used to make children jump. They’re extensions of local history, real events pickled in tall tales. After all, Windham’s talent for a good yarn came out of her experience as a journalist: fresh out of college in 1939, she became a police reporter at The Alabama Journal at a time when a woman in the newsroom was, as one remembrance put it, “as rare as Unitarians in our state.”

Windham chronicled the civil rights movement for the Selma Times-Journal through the fifties and sixties, churning out articles and photographs that documented the internal crisis of the South. In her day job, Windham wrote scathingly about the worst that Alabama had to offer: racist taunts, KKK gatherings, tear gas and billy clubs on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. But in her books, she celebrated the state’s best: folk artists, snake handlers, and magnificent chefs.

Eby notes many schools assign Windham’s first series of ghost stories, 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey, as required reading. “What Windham recognized is that all history is made of ghost stories, whether we choose to believe them or not,” Eby writes. Windham’s ghosts included victims of racial hatred, the Civil War, and accidents, such as the sinking of the steamboat Eliza Battle in the Tombigbee River.

In Windham’s new book, She: The Old Woman Who Took Over My Life, the author departs from ghost stories to tell of more personal experience. Windham describes how she woke up one day to find that she had an unwanted houseguest, an old woman who had suddenly moved into her home and was taking over her life. The author refers to this interloper simply as She, and here the reader has been invited into the lively colloquy between Windham –whose spirit has not changed — and her own alter ego, as Windham moves haltingly toward her earthly end. She will leave you laughing and crying, but also grateful and hopeful.

She: The Old Woman Who Took Over My Life by Kathryn Tucker Windham, is available in hardcover and ebook formats direct from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite bookstore.